เครื่องรางอาซาบาเช (เครื่องรางหินเจ็ต)Azabacheazabache

Jet has been cut for amulets since the Neolithic, and in Spain the trade had a centre: the deposits are in Asturias, but by the end of the Middle Ages the working of jet religious objects and amulets was concentrated at Santiago de Compostela and sold to pilgrims on the Camino. The Asturian version handed to small children was, and is, a higa — the jet fist.

Tabor's account follows the object across the Atlantic. He traces the form to Muslim North Africa, citing Washington Irving's 1829 description of a comparable jet hand among "the Moors of Barbary", into Spain during the Moorish period of 711 to 1492, and then into the Spanish Caribbean colonies. Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican families put one on an infant within days of birth, and Tabor found that the practice continues into adulthood.

What parents told Tabor it is for is specific: the evil eye, and with it diarrhoea, respiratory infections, deformities, and above all sudden infant death. He reports that 29% of the wearers he surveyed had chosen the fist and 71% the polyhedron. He gives a price: US$3 to US$10 in a botánica, a folk-medicine shop, and US$9 to US$55 online at the time he wrote in 2023.

Inference — the red bead is worth noting. Red thread and red beads run with black stone across the whole Mediterranean, and the pairing here is the same pairing Naples makes with coral. This project files that as a family resemblance and not as a descent.

Cut and polished from jet, which is soft enough — Mohs 2.5 to 4 — to work with hand tools but chips if the carver pushes detail. Strung with a red bead, then pinned to the baby's shirt or fastened as a bracelet. It is given, usually by a grandmother or godparent, not bought by the wearer. Nothing in the sources read here describes a blessing; the giving is the act.

Sold in botánicas and online across the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Spain and the United States. Tabor's 2023 figures — US$3 to US$10 in a shop, US$9 to US$55 online — are the last dated prices this project has read. Much of what is sold now is moulded black resin rather than cut jet; jet takes a brown streak on unglazed porcelain and burns like coal, which is how a buyer tells.